Microsoft Cognitive Services is a collection of APIs that enable developers to tap into high-quality vision, speech, language, knowledge, and search technologies—developed through decades of Microsoft research—to build intelligent apps. The following APIs are now available:

Computer Vision API gives you the tools to understand the contents of any image. Create tags identifying objects, beings, or actions in the image, and craft sentences to describe it. With Computer Vision API, you can extract rich information from images to categorize and process visual data—and protect users from unwanted content.

Academic Knowledge API helps tap a wealth of academic content by applying the Knowledge Exploration Service to the Microsoft Academic Graph. Users can start from natural language queries or ping the graph directly through structured query expressions.

Computer Vision API and Academic Knowledge API are available as standalone services, and public preview pricing went into effect on August 4, 2016. For more information about pricing, please visit the Cognitive Services pricing page.